The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Village

By On June 18, 2014 · 36 Comments · In Book/Article Reviews, Left-libertarianism

Chapter 2 of Why Not Capitalism? features a complete, almost paragraph-by-paragraph, parody of Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?.  I mimic his argument, writing style, and phrasing. I often just borrow paragraphs but switch the words around.

The first few paragraphs describing  the capitalist clubhouse village:

Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Daisy Duck, Goofy, Clarabelle Cow, and Professor Ludwig von Drake, and many other characters, live together in a village. There is no hierarchy among them.* They have separate goals and projects, but also share common aims, such as the goal that each of them should have a fulfilling life and good time, doing, so far as possible, the kind of projects that they like best or find most meaningful. Some of these projects they do together; some they do separately.

They have various facilities to carry out their different projects. For example, there are communal spaces, such as amphitheaters, racetracks, obstacles courses, and parks. They avail themselves of these facilities collectively. They have shared understandings of what is going to use what and when, under what circumstances, and why.

There are also privately owned spaces and things. Mickey Mouse owns a clubhouse that he shares with his friends. Minnie owns and runs a “Bowtique”: a hair bow factory and store. Clarabelle Cow owns and runs a “Moo Mart” sundries store and a “Moo Muffin” factory. Donald Duck and Willie the Giant own farms. Professor von Drake owns various inventions, including a time machine and a nanotech machine that can manufacture “mouskatools” on command.

There are differences among the villagers, but their mutual understandings, and their spirit of goodwill, ensure that there are no circumstances to which anyone could mount a principled objection.

In the village, everyone does his or her part. Everyone works hard to add to the social surplus. Everyone trades value for value. Everyone is also free to pursue his or her vision of the good life without having to ask permission from others. At the same time, all the villagers are extremely kind. If anyone has any unmet needs, the others line up to help her. There is no violence or any threats of violence—force is not necessary to maintain social order.

Village life is not all about work! The villagers spend much of their time having fun. They enjoy lightly competitive or non-competitive games, going on adventures, and producing art and music. Sometimes they do these activities alone, sometimes together in small groups, and sometimes with everyone as a whole.

When bad luck strikes—e.g., when some baby ducks must be taught to fly, or when a baby dragon is lost, or when the Tick Tock Time Machine accidentally turns half the villagers into babies, or when a Gooey Goo spill creates five copies of Goofy—the villagers happily come together as a team to solve the problem, making use of their different skills and abilities.

The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse villagers cooperate with a common desire that everyone have the freedom and resources to flourish under their own conceptions of the good life. Everyone operates on principles of mutual concern, tolerance, and respect. They live together happily, without envy, glad to trade value for value, glad to give and share, glad to help those in need, and never disposed to free ride, take advantage of, coerce, or subjugate one another.

Just as Cohen compares his idealized conception of socialism to realistic capitalism, I compare idealized capitalism to realistic socialism. Realistic socialism, of course, tends to suck. Really, the only reasons to advocate socialism in the real world are 1) you are culpably bad at social science or 2) you are a misanthropist.

            You could imagine instead a version of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Village in which—as in socialism—the collective (or its representative, the socialist government) asserts its rights over all pieces of land or equipment, or over everyone’s bodies, minds, and talents. You could imagine that the collective or the socialist government decides who will be allowed, for example, to use the hot air balloons, or what color bows Minnie will make, or who will do what work and when, or whether one person’s organs should be extracted and given to another. You could base the Mickey Mouse Club Village on the principles of socialist work and strictly collective ownership of everything.

Now, most people would hate that. We probably wouldn’t let our children watch that kind of show. Most people would be more drawn to the first kind of Clubhouse Village than to the second, primarily on grounds of fellowship, but also, be it noted, on grounds of efficiency. (I have in mind the inordinate difficulty of trying to have a small board of central planners determine what needs to be done and how to do it.) And this means that most people are drawn to the capitalist ideal, at least in certain restricted settings.

To reinforce this point, consider what it would be like if the villagers stop acting like capitalists and start acting like socialists:

a. Donald decides to forcibly nationalize and control all of the farmland, murdering millions in the process, and causing a massive famine that murders tens of millions more. He uses terror tactics to assert his control. He says [quoting Lenin], “We shall return to terrorism, and it will be an economic terrorism.” But his fellow villagers mutter, in fear, under their breath (when they are sure no one is spying on them), “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Donald Duck, don’t be such a schmuck. You don’t know what these farmlands mean to us, and what role they play in our lives. You don’t know how to farm, what to grow, or how to grow it. Please stop seeing us landowning peasant farmers as enemies of the state!”

b. Things do not go as well as Donald planned, and the other villagers begin to resist. Goofy stifles dissent by creating gulags in the coldest reaches of Disney World. Anyone he deems an enemy is sent to the gulag to be tortured and worked to death. Prisoners receive rations so meager that none have enough energy to meet their work quotas. Yet, the rule of the gulag is that less they work, the less they eat. And so, the prisoners’ bodies wither from starvation and strain, their fingers turn black from frostbite, and their bones break from scurvy. One of Goofy’s prisoners thinks, on his second day in the gulag, “Is this unbearable, or is this something I can survive?…What is it like to break down?” The work is so horrid that many prisoners chop off their own feet—they decide they prefer to die of disease in the gulag hospitals than work themselves to death in fields or mines. Many become what other prisoners call the “the goners” or “the garbage-eaters”—inmates insane from hunger and stress, who wander the prison eating shit, dirt, and trash. Only one group flourishes in Goofy’s gulag: the urkas criminal gang, whose members “tattoo themselves with masturbating monkeys, who [have] their women assist them in the rapes of nuns and politicals,” and whom the “gulag officially designate[s]” as “Socially Friendly Elements.”  [Etc. The horrors go on from there.]

The capitalist villagers live by five principles: 1) the principle of voluntary community, 2) mutual respect, 3) reciprocity, 4) social justice, and 5) beneficence. After describing these principles and how the capitalist village lives by them at some length, I mimic Cohen in saying that these principles are anti-socialist. The paragraphs below imitate a move Cohen makes against capitalism, but it works even better against socialism.

These five principles are in some deep sense anti-socialist. Under socialism, we have seen, there is mutuality, but this is only a by-product of a fundamentally non-reciprocating attitude. The immediate motive toward productivity in a socialist society is (not always but typically) some mixture of fear and greed in proportions that vary with the details of the person’s political position and personal character. It is true that people can and do engage in socialist activity under other inspirations (some positive, such as genuine altruism; some negative, such as the desire to dominate others), but the motives of greed and fear are what socialist societies bring to prominence, and that includes greed on behalf of, and fear for the safety of, one’s family.

Even when one has wider concerns than one’s mere self, the socialist position is greedy and fearful in that one’s fellow socialist citizens are predominantly seen at best as possible sources of enrichment at best and at worst as possible threats or mouths to feed. These are horrible ways of seeing other people, however much we have become habituated and inured to them after a century of socialist civilization.

In the USSR or Cuba, cooperation is based largely on greed and fear. A person does not care fundamentally, within socialist interaction, about how well or badly anyone other than herself fares. They cooperate with other people not because they believe cooperating is a good thing in itself, not because they want all people to flourish, but because they seek to gain and they know that they can do so only if they cooperate with others, or because they worry they will be punished or murdered if they do not do as they are told. In the mutual provisioning of a socialist society, we are essentially indifferent to the fate of the farmer whose food we eat: there is no or little community, respect, or beneficence among us, as those values were articulated above. In this kind of system, what we tend to find is that the people pretend to work and the government pretends to pay.

Steve Horwitz take note: Here’s another paragraph (parodying Cohen) in which Rush gets a shout out:

I continue to find appealing the sentiment of a libertarian song I learned in my childhood, which begins as follows: “And the men who hold high places, must be the ones who start, to mold a new reality, closer to the heart, closer to the heart.” The point is often made, in resistance to the sentiment of the song, that one cannot be friends with the billions of people who compose our large international society: that the ideas is at best impossible to realize, and, so some add, it is even incoherent, because of the exclusivity that goes with friendship. But this song need not be interpreted in that fashion. General social friendship—community—is not an all or nothing thing. It is surely a welcome thing when there is more rather than less community present in society.

Thus, alas, I think Jason Kuznicki’s criticism of Cohen on universal empathy (and, by extension, his criticism of me for following Cohen) is based on a misinterpretation.

The final bits of the parody:

The capitalist aspiration is to extend community, respect, reciprocity, social justice, and beneficience to the whole of our economic life. As I have acknowledged, we now know that we do not know how to do that, and many think we now know that it is impossible to do that. It is imperative now to defend these values, as they are currently under aggressive threat by socialists.

The natural tendency of the socialist state is to increase the scope of the social relations that it covers, because political entrepreneurs see opportunities to secure special privileges and rents at the end to turn what is not yet controlled collectively through force into something that is. Left to its own, the socialist dynamic is self-sustaining, and capitalists therefore need the power of organized politics to oppose it; their socialist opponents, who go with the grain of the system, need that power less (which is not to say that they lack it!).

Capitalism is an attempt to get beyond the predatory phrase of human development. Every socialist society is a system of predation. Our attempts to get beyond predation have thus far failed. I do not think the right conclusion is to give up.

At the beginning of the next chapter, I say:

I doubt socialist readers were convinced by the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse argument in chapter two. They might—should!—suspect there is something dubious about the argument there. It was indeed a kind of philosophical prestidigitation. But it’s a trick I learned from Cohen. The argument is flawed, but I purposefully constructed it to have the same kinds of flaws as Cohen’s argument. The difference between Cohen and me, here, is that I know it’s a trick, whereas he’s tricked himself.

That said, we are about to do some real magic. When we combine 1) Cohen’s flawed argument for the intrinsic moral superiority of socialism, and 2) my flawed argument for the intrinsic moral superiority of capitalism, with 3) a little reflection on what went wrong, what will emerge is 4) a good argument for the intrinsic moral superiority of capitalism. Utopia, it turns out, is capitalist.

*N.B. in the real Mickey Mouse Clubhouse TV-show, Mickey often takes the lead on certain collective projects, but everyone consents to this, because they acknowledge he has superior judgment when it comes to solving the funny problems the villagers encounter.  Donald has a few small character flaws (for comedic effect). Pete sometimes plays a semi-antagonistic role, but usually only when he appears not as himself, but as a special variation of himself, such as “Plundering Pete” or “Space Pirate Pete,” who is not a part of the village and is not supposed to be the real Pete. Even when Pete does play a minor villain, he always learns the error of his ways and by the end of the episode becomes fully virtuous. The purpose of these character flaws is to teach toddlers moral lessons. But all this is incidental to my argument here. We can just imagine a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse show in which Mickey had the same status as everyone else, Donald was less grumpy, and Pete less mischievous.

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  • Lefty

    “Really, the only reasons to advocate socialism in the real world are 1) you are culpably bad at social science or 2) you are a misanthropist.”

    Maybe you should stop calling yourselves “bleeding heart” libertarians as if you actually cared for social justice and weren’t capitalist ideologues. If you were serious about social justice the very least that you would do, would be familiarizing yourselves with other social systems that aren’t capitalist. But everything you do is start with an assumption that capitalism is the best system and then go on to defend it, without ever bothering to think of alternatives.

    Really, all the articles I see here on Marxism, Socialism or Communism, all of them are utter and miserable misrepresentations of the position held by radicals. You build your straw-men and you knock them down – and good for you – but Marxism, Socialism and Communism stand in their own right. And they stand head and shoulders above the intellectual midgets that are right-wing libertarians.

  • Lefty

    “Really, the only reasons to advocate socialism in the real world are 1) you are culpably bad at social science or 2) you are a misanthropist.”

    Maybe you should stop calling yourselves “bleeding heart” libertarians as if you actually cared for social justice and weren’t capitalist ideologues. If you were serious about social justice the very least that you would do, would be familiarizing yourselves with other social systems that aren’t capitalist. But everything you do is start with an assumption that capitalism is the best system and then go on to defend it, without ever bothering to think of alternatives.

    Really, all the articles I see here on Marxism, Socialism or Communism, all of them are utter and miserable misrepresentations of the position held by radicals. You build your straw-men and you knock them down – and good for you – but Marxism, Socialism and Communism stand in their own right. And they stand head and shoulders above the intellectual midgets that are right-wing libertarians.

    • agauntpanda

      Well, Brennan’s book is a direct reply to GA Cohen; if you think his articulation of Cohen’s arguments is a misrepresentation, it seems like you should say why that is. Or people might start to think you don’t really know what you’re talking about. You wouldn’t want that, would you?

    • Jason Brennan

      I’ve presenting this work in front of hundreds of leftist academics, including Cohenites, and no one claims I’ve gotten him wrong.

      But I’m not right-wing. I am the most left-wing philosopher alive.

      That said, I’m purposefully being unfair to socialists here, because I’m parodying Cohen. Later, in chapter 3, I explain why I did that.

  • Jerome Bigge

    The term “socialism” has a different meaning today than it did originally. Jack London, who wrote about the end of the 19th Century, the beginning of the 20th Century, used the term to describe what we would call “Syndicalism” today. (visit Wiki for more details). What was created in the Soviet Union was actually by the original meaning of the term more a perversion of the ideas of Karl Marx used by power seeking terrorists (which is what they were) than anything else. Another example might be the Nazis who were supposedly members of “The National Socialist German Workers Party”, but again governed through the use of terror much like the late Saddam Hussain did in Iraq.

    • Les Kyle Nearhood

      What was created in the Soviet union was not a perversion of Marx, They tried really hard to get it right. It is all in his writings. You see that it the problem with Marx, He wrote some things that were smart, some things that were very very stupid, and he wrote many things that were out and out contradictory.

      • Damien S.

        Tried really hard except for the democracy bit, which they completely borked.

        • TracyW

          Amazing isn’t it how communists keep borking on democracy? It’s like there’s some fundamental incompatibility between societal control of the economy and tolerating disagreement and dissent and other such pluralistic behaviours.

          • somberjellyfish

            Bolsheviks borked democracy because they were fundamentally anti-democratic. They didn’t really believe in democracy. e.g. Trotsky: “the proletariat can take power only through its vanguard”. The entire communist movement from then on was Leninist inspired, and so it’s no wonder they all went the same way.

          • TracyW

            And through all that history of Communism, with all the twists, and reactions against the Soviet Union and its ideas of Communism, the Communists kept on being dictatorial. Julius Nyerere developed “African Socialism” and the Non-Aligned Movement, but he kept the dictatorship (though to give him his due, eventually he stood down and apologised). Tito broke with the Soviet Union, but he kept the dictatorship. The economic failures of Communism became self-evident, but Cuba keeps the dictatorship. Vietnam and China introduced market reforms, but keep the dictatorship. Once they’re in power, Communists are very fond of dictatorships.

          • somberjellyfish

            All of these regimes were inspired by Leninism, were they not? Just because someone “broke with the Soviet Union” doesn’t mean that they don’t share the same world view.

          • TracyW

            Yes, indeed, all inspired by Leninism, particularly the bit where he was all in favour of democracy right up until the time that he got into power. Of all the teachings of Leninism, that’s the one that socialists have been fondest of.

      • somberjellyfish

        There are non-marxist socialists, you know. The anarchist movement (in the original use of that word) considered themselves socialist, for example.

  • AP²

    These arguments always seem to assume that socialists are necessarily statists, leaving out my neighbours at the local Center of Libertarian Culture, which are neither capitalists nor statists (I live in Europe, where capitalist anarchism would be called “liberal”, not “libertarian”).

    • Jason Brennan

      Yeah, in this section, I’m unfair to socialists on purpose. I’m unfair because I’m parodying Cohen, and he’s unfair to capitalists.

  • agauntpanda

    I wonder if Jason somehow mind-controlled the previous two commenters into posting their comments, as they so perfectly express the “regime vs. value” fallacy he talks about in the latter half of the book.

  • Jason Kuznicki

    “It is surely a welcome thing when there is more rather than less community present in society.”

    Maybe. But see my objections about what it would perhaps require, and what it would do to our mental states. I’m not sure we’d like or even recognize the product if we turned that dial all the way up.

    So: exactly how much community is Cohen saying that we need if we want to achieve socialism?

    He doesn’t have to stipulate a necessary amount, of course, and I don’t believe he does. But he does volunteer a sufficient one: the amount of community that we have with friends with whom we’d go camping. That level was his suggestion, not mine. I’m simply running with it.

    One might argue that we could have a working socialism with a lower degree of community. But why then don’t we see small-scale socialisms all the time? They ought to be common, and not oddities at any scale much above a handful of friends on a short-term camping trip.

    • Jason Kuznicki

      Another oddity I just thought of: If I were on a camping trip with relative (or even complete) strangers, I would probably behave in very nearly the same ways that I would with friends.

      The implications of this are huge: Friendship may have nothing whatsoever to do with the behaviors observed while camping – which is, let’s recall, a fairly scripted and well-understood cultural practice, with deeply ingrained norms of its own, much like sports, or marriage, or eating at a restaurant. Friendship (and thus community) may not be our real quarry here at all.

  • Theresa Klein

    Did Cohen actually use the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Villiage as an example of the ideal socialist society? Because from what I can tell, it looks like both sides visions look like cartoon versions of society that only a four year old could believe would actually work. I guess this is where the culpable incompetence at social science comes in.
    Apparently in the ideal future, there is no sexual rivalry or jealosy, everyone has a nearly psychic understanding of everyone else’s needs and motivations, everyone is a perfect communicator, a good listener, and a reasonable negotiator, and nobody ever wants anything that someone else doesn’t want to give them.

  • Theresa Klein

    in the real Mickey Mouse Clubhouse TV-show, Mickey often takes the lead on certain collective projects, but everyone consents to this, because they acknowledge he has superior judgment when it comes to solving the funny problems the villagers encounter.
    The problem is that none of these things are generally true in real life.
    In real life, It’s unclear why Mickey Mouse gets to take the lead and whether his judgement is superior, and not everyone consents to it either way. Some people want to do something other than what Mickey Mouse wants to do, and they have plenty of supporters willing to go help them do that.
    The point of the show in the first place is to teach children to be obedient and fall into line with a hierarchical social order. Go along with what Mickey does because he’s smarter and better than you. But it teaches people nothing about what to do when the people in charge are either wrong, incompetent, or immoral. Or what to do when a substantial part of society doesn’t consent to the legal authority of the people in charge, because THEY think that they are wrong, incompetent or immoral. In short, these sort of stories make horrible analogies because they bear no actual resemblance to the real dilemma of how to organize society, which is not about who has the best judgement and how to obey orders, but is all about how to co-exist with people who aren’t all following the same leader and don’t agree about who it should be, or whether there should be one at all.

  • Phil Lines

    Jason, do you have any articles addressing specifically socialism as self-management (what Wolff might call Worker’ Self-Directed Enterprises). I’m sure you’re aware that many socialists (e.g. the SWP in the UK) would dismiss the Soviet Union as ‘state capitalist’. Even Chomsky would give that kind of analysis. So what I think socialists are advocating is ‘economic democracy’. They think that such an institutional structure will lead to more just and egalitarian outcomes; they might point to empirical data such as Mondragon for evidence. I think this is the role of BHL, to take on the most plausible, and least cartoonish, socialist position. I’d love to read your take on it! Thanks.

    • TracyW

      The problem with advocating WSDE as a means of socialism is that it’s entirely compatible with capitalism. As has been pointed out by a number of self-identified left-wing critics. http://machete408.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/self-managed-capitalism-criticism-of-richard-wolff-and-workers-cooperatives/

      And the socialists who call the Soviet Union “state capitalist” are, as far as I can tell, operating on logic that goes like this:
      1. Socialism can’t fail, it’s capitalism that is going to fail.
      2. The Soviet Union’s economic system failed.
      3. This is impossible, unless the Soviet Union’s economic system is capitalist.
      4. Hey, we can stick the word “state” on front of the word “capitalist” and thus claim the Soviet Union was capitalist. Thus all our beliefs are self-consistent! Yay!
      I’ve debated a number of these guys and when I point out all the ways that the Soviet Union conformed or tried to conform to the 10 points of the Communist Manifesto they’re stumped. It’s not an intellectually-serious idea.

      • Damien S.

        I see a different logic: capitalism involves being told what to do by the capitalist, in contrast with worker democracy; the Soviet state took the role of capitalist, telling everyone what to do.

        There’s more to communism or socialism than the ten points; *democracy* is a recurrent theme in socialist writing, including Marx’s, yet absent from the Communist Party states. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” was to be direct or proxy democracy, mob rule if you’re mean, not Lenin’s party dictatorship.

        • CT

          You think ‘worker democracy’ will not involve one group telling another group what to do? Congrats! You’ve just defined virtually every social and economic order as ‘capitalist’.

          • Damien S.

            Sure, if you totally ignore the relative distribution and concentration of power and decision-making, despite that being a major point of left-wing critiques.

          • TracyW

            Yes, to quote Leon Trotsky: “In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.”

            Socialism has extreme problems with concentration of power and decision-making.

        • TracyW

          capitalism involves being told what to do by the capitalist

          Nope. Definition of capitalism: “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.”

          Cooperatives and workers’ democracies are entirely compatible with capitalism. Indeed, a lot of law and accountancy firms are partnerships where the senior workers own the firms and hire the admin staff.

          The Soviet state was fundamentally non-capitalist because it tried to not have private owners (although, since socialism doesn’t work, it did wind up allowing some private ownership to stop society falling apart).

          • somberjellyfish

            Nope. Definition of capitalism:
            “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.”

            You can define it like that if you want. Many socialists define capitalism rather differently. For example, David Schweickart defines it as follows:

            * The bulk of the means of production are privately owned, either directly or by corporations that are themselves owned by private individuals.
            * Most products are exchanged in a “market.”
            * Most of the people who work for pay in this society work for other people who own the means of production. Most working people are “wage laborers.”

            We can argue about the definition, but the point remains that if we don’t address each other’s definitions we will be arguing at cross purposes.

            Interestingly, there are broadly libertarian thinkers, such as David Ellerman, for example, who are in favour of private property and markets but see the employment relation as being illegitimate. On my definition, Ellerman is an anti-capitalist, although not necessarily a socialist.

          • TracyW

            We can argue about the definition, but the point remains that if we don’t address each other’s definitions we will be arguing at cross purposes.

            Yep, that’s why I addressed Damien S’s definition by pointing out that the dictionary had a different one.

            Socialists tend to propose definitions of “capitalism” that slant towards capitalism sounding bad. I suspect in most cases this is unconscious, they’re so used to thinking of capitalism as bad that they don’t realise that they are doing this.

            David Schweickart is another example of this tendency. His first two parts of the definition are reasonably reasonable (one could argue a bit about the “most” and where things like the sun and the atmosphere fit in), then the moralising slips in. He adds in, for some reason, a condition about how most people be working for someone else who owns the means of production, but no one I’ve seen who argues for capitalism thinks that that’s a necessary condition. And where do people with an education fit in here? Does a plumber, or a welder, or a teacher, or an accountant, or a musician, work for people who own the means of production? Surely in all those cases a lot of the means of production are within the worker’s head?

          • somberjellyfish

            Yep, that’s why I addressed Damien S’s definition by pointing out that the dictionary had a different one.

            I’m not sure the dictionary is the final arbiter of definitions in social science.

            Socialists tend to propose definitions of “capitalism” that slant towards capitalism sounding bad.

            Does it sound that bad? Most people I’ve spoken to don’t have that big an objection to wage labour. I’m decidedly in the minority in seeing wage labour as an inherently degrading condition (whether your boss is a state bureaucrat, or a capitalist manager).

            If you think the mere mention of the indisputable dominance of wage labour makes capitalism sound bad, then you’re more of a socialist than you seem!

          • TracyW

            I’m not sure the dictionary is the final arbiter of definitions in social science.

            However, I presume you would agree that if you want to make a genuine criticism of capitalism, it is much better to start off with a neutral definition, or even a definition used by self-proclaimed defenders of capitalism, not by a definition that only exists in the minds of socialists. Seriously, who did Damien S think would be convinced by that definition?

            Does it sound that bad? Most people I’ve spoken to don’t have that big an objection to wage labour. I’m decidedly in the minority in seeing wage labour as an inherently degrading condition

            See? Even if most people you speak to don’t have that big an objection to wage labour, you yourself do. Of all the possible definitions of capitalism you could have picked, you picked one that, to you at least, was slanted against capitalism. And note, I didn’t even mention the term “wage labour” in my response to David Schweickart’s definition. Why didn’t you start out with a definition of capitalism that struck you, at least, as morally neutral?

        • TracyW

          As for democracy being a recurrent theme in socialist writing, it may be, but they’re engaging in castle-in-the-air illogic, democracy is incompatible with socialism and democracy, because of the problem of coordinating production plans.

          • Damien S.

            That makes no sense.

          • TracyW

            Sorry, my bad. Edited now to make sense!

  • M Lister

    I’ll admit that I’m sorry that you wrote the book like this. I found the style of Cohen’s book to be grating and unpleasant, making it an unappealing read. The “parody”, as far as I can tell from what you’ve posted here, seems even less enjoyable to read. (Cohen is famous among philosophers as a stylist, and while it’s not at all my cup of tea, there is something in his ability to do the sort of thing he does. Others are…not so good at it.) Because of this, I’m unlikely to want to read the book, I’ll admit. I wish it would have been done in a more straight-forward way.

  • http://undertheoculartree.com/ Michael Ezra

    I have reviewed Jason Brennan’s book here: http://bit.ly/1r6YefA

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